Are There Any Good Financial Stocks?

With all this news about Fannie , Freddie , Lehman , WaMu , and others (see short interest in these banks here), you might be asking yourself, are there any good banks out there. Here is a screen for stocks from the S&P Financials sector that are actually doing well for the year. To start, we looked for companies in the Financials that are up over 5% YTD (the sector is down 27% YTD).

The results are the 19 companies shown below. Hudson City , Cramer's darling, leads the list, up 26% YTD. As you can see from the list, many of these have respectable dividend yields and have double digit earnings growth forecast for their next fiscal year. As a whole, the group of 19 have an average yield of over 3% and growth forecast of nearly 7%.

Use this data from Thomson Reuters as a starting point to more research. Lessons from the recent collapse of Freddie and Fannie show that dividends are not a guarantee. Some of these have negative growth forecasts for next year. In the end, maybe there are some good banks out there after all...